18 October 2023

TechBio 2023: UK driving the AI revolution

TechBio is the interface where life science and artificial intelligence (AI) meet. TechBio companies helping to develop new drugs and therapies more quickly, personalising and targeting medicine more accurately, creating powerful new diagnostic tools, and improving the end-to-end efficiency of discovery in the life sciences. These innovations have the potential to improve the health and well-being of people around the world and to speed up potential solutions to global sustainability challenges.

The BIA is committed to supporting the growth of the TechBio sector and to raising awareness of the companies in this space and their incredible potential. It is a sustainable competitive advantage for the UK. Across both financings and alliances, the UK is second only to the US for TechBio deal-making over the last 18 months.

Over the past few years, we have been on a journey with our developing TechBio community, providing great events and networking, sector promotion and guidance. The BIA is also working hard to advocate on issues our members have told us matter to them:

Access to data for SMEs and development of coherent UK health data infrastructure
Developing a pool of digital and data-focussed talent
Access to greater multiples of investment to enable sustainable and patient funding of scaling TechBio companies in the UK
Development of appropriate and proportionate regulatory frameworks to both enable and harness innovation for good.

Building on our first report, TechBio: How data-driven life sciences companies are transforming drug discovery and patient care and our second report, TechBio 2.0: Unlocking Data, Transforming Biology, activity in this part of the sector has continued at pace.

In this third TechBio report, we revisit progress in these areas, take a bird’s eye view of the broader state of TechBio as the sector matures, and highlight some incredible new companies in the space. The report spotlights early-stage companies such as Brainomix, Cardia Tec, Sixfold, Turing Biosystems, Etcembly and Serna Bio.

We want to thank Luca Parisi (Director, Clinical Analytics and Data Science, Citeline), Daniel Chancellor (Director, Thought Leadership and Consulting, Citeline), and James Wong (Venture Partner, MedTech SuperConnector, Expertin-Residence, Imperial College London and BIA TechBio UK Advisory Group) for contributing to the report.